Gauntlet Wars: House Phoenix (Star Force Gauntlet Wars Book 3), page 20
18
EG30
November 29, 158439
MILKY WAY GALAXY
Lorichar Kingdom
Pokmar System
Pokka Tula
It would later be known in historical records as The Fall of Pokka Tula, but right now it was happening in real time for Andre Nottingson. The reinforcements coming across the Galactic Threads had increased dramatically the past year as the Asferja colonies in Andromeda continued to increase despite the sabotage efforts Paul-024 and House Phoenix were making there. The battles in dozens of primary arrival systems were now multi-year affairs, with the debris fields from destroyed Asferja ships and Star Force drones now out-massing the active fleets themselves.
But something else had come through with those fleets, and it wasn’t the Bru’son. Another race had somehow slipped in through all the chaos and quietly set up shop around several stars in uninhabited systems within the Lorichar Kingdom. Systems that were not travel hubs, and ones that Star Force had no monitoring satellites in. They had chosen them well, and for the past several months they’d been assembling their ships together into very low stellar orbit to form construction platforms that drew material directly from the star.
Their identity was unknown, but for now they were just being called the ‘Star Forge Race’ and their foothold was firmly established. It wasn’t until scores of tiny ships…most only measuring a mile or two long…started flowing out from these systems was Star Force able to backtrack them to their source. Subsequent attacks by the Empire were thwarted easily, for the Star Forges were drawing energy directly from the stars and their shields were likewise boosted to significant measure. These factories also had impressive weapon capabilities, as did the ships they were actively producing from the stellar material.
They hadn’t brought a combat fleet with them across the galactic void. They’d brought factories, and now they were producing their fleets right in the Milky Way.
But they weren’t attacking Star Force. No, they were counterattacking the defense fleets to help let more Asferja into this galaxy, and while their ships were not very combat effective, somehow they could make them very, very fast. The Empire’s defense fleets tore through them easier than they were the Asferja ships, but the Star Forge race’s attacks were hitting them from behind and, coupled with the Bru’son’s assaults on the shipping lanes, enough Asferja were able to slip through and pool together in a separate system…but they didn’t put down roots there. They simply collected themselves before launching an assault on Pokka Tula.
It was thought to put Star Force on the defensive and draw their resources there, allowing more Asferja to slip into the galaxy uncontested. But what they didn’t know was that Pokka Tula and other nearby Star Force worlds had already been evacuated of non-essential personnel in the hopes that the Asferja would attack them and the Empire could use the planetary defense systems to further reduce their swarm’s numbers.
And that was happening far more than Andre had ever hoped it would, for the Asferja had already fought their way into low orbit and had bombarded the planetary defense shields into submission…which had taken some 1.2 million of their tiny ships to do it, and they’d lost more than a third of them in the process. But the entire shield didn’t go down, just a section temporarily, then they bombarded the shield generators in that section to make sure it wouldn’t go up again.
Then through that gap, they descended onto the planet and the ground war began as their fleet retreated up into higher orbit and guarded their safe corridor down to the planet, keeping any Star Force vessels away from the stream of transports they were sending down.
In reality, the Star Force fleet…which was much smaller at this point…was standing by on the other side of the planet, not to avoid the Asferja, but to maintain their evac corridor for the troops and everyone else on the planet that was going to bleed the Asferja dry as they gradually took it, for all the other shield generators and surface to orbit weaponry installations were still intact. And unless the Asferja took them on the ground, they’d have to try to do it from orbit and they’d lose the rest of their fleet in the process…and Pokka Tula was not the most heavily defended planet in the Empire by far. It was what you might call mid-level at best. Far from new colony status, but the Asferja had not chosen to hit one of the tougher nuts in the Lorichar Kingdom. Apparently they thought this one was strong enough for Star Force to try to defend, hence drawing ships away from the entry zones, but not too strong that they couldn’t take it yet.
They were quite eager about taking it too, and the ground fighting was even more intense than the firestorm that had happened in orbit. Multiple galaxies of Star Force mechs were in play on the Bsidd world and tearing through the Asferja troops, but they couldn’t hold out against the constant streams coming down from orbit…so the plan was a fighting retreat, with an army of techs going through and destroying everything of value in the cities before they fell, as well as wiping databases. They were not going to give the Asferja an intact Star Force planet to learn from, so it was Andre’s job, along with the other Mainline Commandos here supporting the Bsidd, to make sure things didn’t fall too fast.
And that was proving to be a headache. His command was only 12,400 strong, and they were spread out across five different cities at this point, with 18 already having fallen in good order. The Bsidd defense troops were proving their worth and taking few losses as they traded ground for Asferja lives. The carpet of dead were everywhere, but the Empire’s troops weren’t having to deal with it as they were retreating onto clear ground with every step they took…while leaving plenty of boobytraps in their wake that the Asferja were disarming with warm bodies.
Everything you would not want to do as a swarm race the Asferja were doing. Star Force was setting them up in so many ways, yet they didn’t seem to care. They just took the losses and kept plowing on forward…and all these troops were coming from offworld. They weren’t growing them here, not yet anyway, so every bug Andre, his Commandos, and the larger Bsidd could kill was one that had to be diverted from other planets in the Lorichar Kingdom.
In essence, Star Force let them come here in order for the Asferja to assemble in one spot rather that continuing to try and send out seeding ships everywhere else.
And the dumb bugs had fallen for it. They could have been pushing beyond this kingdom into others before trying to put down roots at this point, with the help of the Star Forgers running interference, but instead they had chosen to come here and try and knock off the first Star Force world in this campaign.
And the Empire was going to let them have it, but at a very, very high cost in ships, troops, and time.
The trick was for Andre not to get himself and his men killed in the process.
Right now he was inside one of the besieged cities, with the defensive wall having been breached in the northeast quadrant and the ground fighting moving into the streets there, but the Bsidd Commandos…which were of several variants far larger than a Human…had them momentarily stopped as the rest of the Asferja continued to pound on the exterior wall as multiple turrets and shield generators were working to stop those attacks effectively, and the mounds of dead outside were rising almost as high as the wall in some places.
The city’s shield had already been taken down by air attacks…a lot of them. The Asferja in-atmosphere craft were just as numerous as their ground troops, and even now there were anti-air turrets around the city still swatting down more of them, but most of their surviving aircraft had moved off to let the ground teams handle the rest after helping them blow a hole in the outer wall which had its own small shield generators covering sections of it.
And Andre knew why they had pulled back the aircraft…they were getting damn low on them. They weren’t going to be able to hit another city in that way until they got more reinforcements, and that was going to slow down their advance to just what their ground troops could handle, and if they tried going up against an intact city, the main shields would cover the perimeter towers that would maul an approaching land force. The aircraft had taken those out here, and now the horde was basically free to run into the city and do their thing.
But the Bsidd were doing theirs as well, and the kill count was rising drastically as they tried to buy time for the last of the demolition teams to make ‘safe’ the city of any sensitive technology while Andre’s men were busy laying out mines and setting up barricades to slow and direct the Asferja soon to get to them.
Andre was running around in his command armor, which was a bit light on the ‘armor’ but with all kinds of comm systems that could punch through a lot of enemy jamming, and the Asferja were no slouches when it came to that. It was hard to tell which bugs were carrying the gear, but they communicated telepathically with each other in a hive mind…so they preferred jamming all technological communications as a matter of course.
Star Force tech was a bit too good for them, though, and all they could manage was to reduce their range rather than jam them entirely, but in an urban landscape where the buildings also interfered with signals, once the relays built into the city infrastructure were destroyed or lost power, his Commandos were going to have to rely on line of sight, man to man comm relays, just as the Bsidd were doing now.
“Commander Nottingson,” a Bsidd-accented voice said into his helmet as he was climbing a ladder up the side of one of the city spires. “The Asferja have broken through to the undercity.”
“Shit,” he whispered. They’d sealed all those access points and camouflaged them well, but apparently not enough. “Are they flanking you?”
“Not yet, but we must prepare. We are pulling back to Zone 293.”
“Copy that. We’ll be ready,” he said, then finished the last few rungs until he got to the roof where six other Commandos were already stationed beneath a portable shield generator that was creating a hemispherical bubble over their position in case any of the remaining aircraft came back their way.
“Another wave coming in,” Commando Harkin reported from his sentry position as he pointed to the southwest. “They’re really upset this time. Did we do something special to piss them off?”
“I think they’re just trying to compensate for their lack of aircraft,” he said, zooming in with his own helmet’s gear to get a look at the column of fresh troops heading toward the city as those outside were still dying to the perimeter defenses as they tried to open up a second breach point somewhere along the perimeter. The entire city was surrounded at this point, and the route of escape for the troops and techs was actually underground…which was why the incursion of the Asferja into the undercity this soon could be problematic.
“This feels like more than that.”
“Better safe than sorry,” he agreed, using his high powered comm system to link in with the remaining transmitters in the city and to get a signal across the planet and into orbit.
“Field Commander requesting fire support,” he said, mentally tagging the coordinates and what he was interested in getting in the message packet. A single icon on his HUD was his only reply, which indicated that one of the orbital drones would be incoming.
“Brick on the way,” he said. “ETA 32 minutes.”
“Do they really have to keep them so far away?” Jenkins said. “The Archons are playing it too close on this one.”
“You’re second guessing the Archons now?”
“Why not, I helped train them,” he said, reminding his ‘young’ commander that he was some 156,429 years old, while Andre was only 7,209.
“They’re a bit wiser than both of us combined, so shut it old guy. They’re not going to let the Bsidd get mauled, even if they wouldn’t mind losing you.”
“You first,” Jenkins countered. “I’m just hiding behind your skirt.”
“What is it with you and skirts?”
“Old joke,” he said, waving it off. Some of the stuff that came out of his mouth baffled Andre, but then again he did have a lot more cultural slang in his vocabulary from all those millennia to draw from than Andre did. “I think we’ve got a runner.”
The Commander followed the line of his arm to finger down into the city and caught a glimpse of a lone Asferja. A scout, most likely. They’d pulled this before, making his team think they were just a bunch of dumb brutes lining up to get killed while sneaking a few units around to do some clandestine work.
“All yours, buddy.”
“Thank you,” Jenkins said, hopping over the wall and through the shield barrier, then falling some 32 stories down to the ground and using his armor’s limited anti-grav to slow him at the very end. He only got a five second pulse out of it before the capacitor was out of juice, but with the .8g local gravity on the city streets, he knew it’d be just enough.
He hit hard though, his knees bending and him dumping himself forward and taking some of the momentum on his torso before it all canceled out. He rolled through the badly executed somersault and came to his feet…then was sprinting in the direction of the Asferja runner, knowing they were damn fast. Faster than him in most cases, so he activated the powered armor upgrade in his suit and let it add distance to each stride his own muscles made.
That gave him a hopping boost, making him feel like the Master Chief of old. Fortunately the current generations knew what that was, for the trailblazers had made sure to preserve such valuable nuggets of Old Earth culture. Even the Commando armor looked a bit like the Chief’s Mjolnir, but in truth, he’d have been jealous of the Commando’s, for it had long ago exceeded the science fiction universe’s wildest expectations.
Jenkins made two turns, sprinting between both each time, before he caught sight of the Asferja running on six legs ahead of him. It too was leaping, and he knew he couldn’t catch it from behind so he pulled out his combat rifle from his back rack and started firing. He hit it twice before it slid to a halt and turned around, seeing what was shooting it, then decided to charge back at the lone soldier.
“Dipshit,” Jenkins said, knowing he could take it despite being out-massed at least 4 to 1.
He kept running but slowed down as he continued to fire. The scout fired back with two pistols while taking hits to its carapace, which resulted in blackened spots but no full penetration. Jenkins was going to have to make better shots into the vulnerable areas if he wanted to kill it, but the enemy’s pistol shots were just being absorbed by his personal shields. The bug couldn’t win.
Which felt odd.
Just before they got close enough to ram each other, Jenkins pulsed his now recharged anti-grav again and jumped to the right, catching the wall with his foot and twisting to shoot down on the Asferja had he launched himself over top of it by two meters.
As he did so, the Asferja exploded.
Jenkins was thrown much higher, and barely managed to pulse the rest of his capacitor to slow his fall, but he landed hard on his back and slid down the street to an eventual stop, with the padding in his helmet not being enough to stop him from getting a concussion.
The packet of healing nanites resting between his shoulder blades on the interior of the armor immediately activated, melting and coursing over his body in little silver tendrils until it reached his head and other places where he was injured. They dove into his tissue on a microscopic level and started triggering rapid new cell growth with the packet drawing new material from a small cube of dense biomatter that was situated in the armor beside it.
Within seconds the ringing in his head cleared and the tweaked muscle in his left arm healed up, with his HUD reporting the injuries and the healing seconds later, returning his status to ‘full green’ before that too disappeared and cleared his vision.
He stood up, seeing the scarring on the left side of his armor as his shields started to slowly regenerate. They’d been taken down entirely in the blast, then the damage to his armor was from what was left. The little fall on the ground had barely scratched it, if that.
He tried to connect to the Commander, but he didn’t have line of sight, so Jenkins ran off down a side street and did a bit of zigzag until he got near another Commando that could bounce the signal down others and up to Andre.
“Bug was a bomber,” he reported. “Tried to take me out as soon as I engaged rather than run. Probably after infrastructure, but it coming after me…”
“…suggests it didn’t want to be discovered,” Andre finished. “They’re counting on their jamming a little too much and think they can go where they like. Any idea where he was headed.”
Jenkins glanced around inside his helmet, looking visually and on the map inside his HUD. “Not really.”
“Get back up here then.”
“On my way,” Jenkins said, running off to get back to the command post atop one of the many spires in the city that had not yet fallen to the Asferja.
19
Two days later the Commandos and Bsidd were down in the tunnels, abandoning the city and fighting to hold off the growing numbers of Asferja ground troops despite the low level strafing run of a small naval drone that had thinned them considerably before being destroyed by their aircraft swarms.
Underground trains were hauling the Bsidd out, with Andre’s Commandos holding the terminal until the end. Then when it was time for last call, he hopped on the last car and sped off down the length of tunnel exchanging a few final shots with the Asferja, one of which caught him in the chest and dropped his shields down into the yellow range.
At least on his HUD’s monitor. The shields themselves didn’t change color. That would be stupid to let the enemy know how much shield strength you had. Better they thought they were impenetrable up until the moment they broke rather than give them a status report on their progress.
He leaned back against the wall, staring out at the length of the tunnel rapidly flashing by with marker lights as the terminal disappeared in the distance. There were no more cars left intact behind them. As per standing protocol, anything they didn’t use they destroyed. If the Asferja wanted to reach the next city through this underground line, they were going to have to walk or bring their own ride.
